Indonesian presidential candidates Prabowo Subianto (L) and Joko Widodo (R) attend a breaking-fast ceremony with outgoing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the presidential palace in Jakarta on July 20.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Indonesia’s elections commission is expected to announce today that Jakarta Gov. Joko Widodo won the July 9 race to become the country’s next president.

But the battle for the presidency may not end there.

Prabowo Subianto, the former army general who fought a close contest against Mr. Widodo, has said he will challenge official poll results at the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest legal body when it comes to resolving elections disputes.

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Mr. Subianto will have three days to submit his challenge and evidence to the court, which will then have 14 working days to make a decision, potentially prolonging the state of election limbo as long as Aug. 21.

The results today are not binding if one party challenges them at the Constitutional Court; they would become legally binding only after the court issues a verdict.

Even then, the bar for legal challenges is high, since the court requires definitive evidence of wrongdoing to take on a case. During legislative elections in April, only 21 of the around 900 cases submitted to the court were processed; all others were dismissed.

The number of votes Mr. Subianto would have to move to win a challenge also makes his chances unlikely, legal experts say. Unofficial counts suggest that Mr. Widodo won the race by least six million votes, with more than 130 million of the country’s 188 million registered voters casting ballots. Past vote challenges have changed hundreds of votes and occasionally thousands, but nothing on the order of the current margin between the two men.

Making a case before the Constitutional Court will “prolong the process,” said Hikmahanto Juwana, a law professor at the University of Indonesia. “But at the end of the day it’s not going to make a difference.”

Indonesia’s Constitutional Court is seen during a hearing in Jakarta on Aug. 12, 2009.

Reuters

Mr. Subianto’s camp is already moving to challenge the process in two other ways that will not directly affect the results. On Monday, it filed an ethics complaint against the Jakarta branch of the national elections commission that could lead to the dismissal of regional elections officials. It also says it plans to file criminal charges against the national elections commission.

Political analysts say both moves are an attempt to delegimatize the elections commission, known as the KPU, casting doubt on the election as a whole.

But given the unprecedented level of scrutiny of the poll, legal experts say Mr. Subianto’s challenges are unlikely to go far.

“The KPU is saying ‘yes, there is cheating,’ but it is not significant enough for them to delay the process,” said Mr. Juwana, the legal scholar.

Privately, some members of Mr. Subianto’s coalition suggest they don’t have the evidence to mount a serious challenge, saying the current maneuvering stems from data that was mishandled by some factions of the grouping.

“I think only a few among the leadership still reject the outcome” that Mr. Widodo won, one high-ranking member of Mr. Subianto’s coalition told The Wall Street Journal.

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